As a city, the hardest part about temporarily closing some of your streets to traffic and turning them into pedestrian walkways is that people start liking them too much. Even after you open the streets back up, you’ve permanently recontextualized these spaces for thousands of nearby residents by demonstrating how much of their public realm is ceded to the needs of cars,…
parks
Terra Office Tower Project Raising the Bar for Design at the Domain
A 21-story office project with design work from one of the city’s most well-known architecture firms could bring a signature tower to the master-planned Domain Northside shopping center in North Austin, a part of town that could use more iconic tower designs as its increasing heights seek the status of Austin’s “second downtown.” Renderings revealed this week for the…
Who Was the ‘Duncan’ of Downtown Austin’s Duncan Park?
Austin’s most underrated downtown green space is almost certainly Duncan Park, located along Shoal Creek at West Ninth Street just east of North Lamar Boulevard. Despite its lack of prominence due to the location along downtown’s fuzzy western boundary, with development trends in the surrounding area we’re pretty bullish on Duncan Park becoming a more prominent community…
Downtown Austin’s Lost Fourth Square Could Serve the Public Once Again
When Edwin Waller drafted the original plan for the City of Austin in 1839, he designated four blocks in the plan’s grid as public squares. Three of those four blocks still exist in the modern-day downtown — Wooldridge Square, Republic Square, and Brush Square. But one block, known as Hamilton Square, is missing. Bound by Ninth, Tenth,…
Demolition Pending for Downtown Austin’s Former Brick Oven Pizza Site
After roughly 11 years of hemming and hawing, it looks like the 27-story hotel tower long prophesied at the northeast corner of 12th and Red River Streets in downtown Austin is taking at least a baby step into the real world. A demolition permit for the approximately 5,900-square-foot building dating back to the late 1940s currently occupying the corner at…
Austin’s Single-Family Zoning Reform Heads for Public Hearing
Changes to Austin’s zoning code introduced by City Council this summer are headed for a number of public hearings over the next few months — and although we believe these amendments reforming the city’s widespread single-family zoning largely responsible for our local housing affordability crisis are an inspiring step in the right direction, we’re also expecting to see a lot of homeowner opposition to these and other upcoming changes…